brain drain
두뇌 유출
Brain drain is the emigration of educated and skilled people, causing a society or state to lose human capital. In East Germany, mass migration through West Berlin reduced the supply of young and educated workers and placed pressure on labour and state administration.
In depth
During the Cold War, East Germany’s brain drain developed under the conditions of German division and the open route through West Berlin. The emigrants were not exclusively workers with advanced training, but engineers, physicians, teachers, lawyers, and other professionals were disproportionately represented, weakening productive and social capacities. East German and Soviet leaders treated the loss as both a labour problem and a crisis in the competition between systems, and the Berlin Wall of 1961 closed the principal route. The term therefore denotes not migration in general, but the asymmetrical loss of education and skills together with the state response to it.
Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) (supports the term’s use for the disproportionately highly educated migration from East Germany and its role in the background to the Wall)
- Wikipedia (EN) (supports brain drain as the loss of educated people through emigration and the Eastern Bloc context)
- history.state.gov (U.S. Office of the Historian, supports the mass exodus through Berlin and its political significance before the Wall)
- nsarchive.gwu.edu (National Security Archive, supports the Cold War East German context and documentary framing of the Berlin crisis)